


Decision Days

by galacticproportions



Series: The Ripening Stars [1]
Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Ethical Dilemmas, F/M, I love that "Ethical Dilemmas" is a tag, M/M, PTSD, This is not the porn you're looking for
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-19
Updated: 2016-03-19
Packaged: 2018-05-27 19:07:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,858
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6296455
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/galacticproportions/pseuds/galacticproportions
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>By the time they start to wean him off the painkillers, he's remembered that billions of people died.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Decision Days

 

He sinks slowly from the void into his body. It must have been the deep reconditioning this time, the one they put you under for, and he instinctively searches for the foursquare, shipshape feeling that follows and the sweat-and-armor smell of the transport bunks.

 

Then he remembers that his lie came true, and thousands of people died, and he doesn't know where Rey is.

 

*

 

The medics won't tell him that. They won't tell him when he can expect to get up. They do tell him not to _try_ to get up: "You've got an IV line going in one end and a catheter coming out the other," a one-eared veteran says when he asks. "We've got you by the short hairs, kid." They won't tell him where Poe is either; when they think he can't see them, they roll their eyes when he asks if he can speak to the General. They tend him well, they're brisk and blank, they call him "kid" and "son." He's not sure they know who he is; he's not sure he knows either.

 

By the time they start to wean him off the painkillers, he's remembered that _billions_ of people died. Whole planets of people--how can he understand this, how can he know it, how can he imagine it? His brain takes to playing his lightsaber cutting through someone, a stranger, in the uniform he used to wear. A billion of those moments, a billion lives like that, just like that, gone, over and over. He looks like he's staring out the window but the only light he's seeing is the bright cold arc of the blade.

 

That's what he's doing, sitting up and eating mush, when one of the junior medics comes in, her big frame blocking the doorway. "Here he is," she says to someone behind her. "And none of your antics, Dameron. You keep off that bed." The visitor says something Finn--that's who he is, he knows now--can't hear that makes the medic crack a smile, and Poe comes in, twice as alive as anyone else.

 

It's not like when they saw each other for the second time. There's no impulse, there's constraint, and Finn still can't move much. The air between them hums with that restless life that seems to come off Poe in waves, like the strain heat puts on the air. "It's good to see your eyes open," he says.

 

"It's good to see you." It is, too. "You came in while I was..." Was in the void. Was nothing.

 

"A couple of times, I did, yeah. But mostly I was--away. And I have to fly out again in a few days. Which is why I'm here, to see you, before I do that."

 

"To fight?" It's hard to get the words past his throat.

 

"To look. Look for First Order ships that escaped Starkiller Base, look for traces of where people, especially their top people, might've gone to regroup. Hell, look for defectors." He smiles with one side of his mouth and makes like he's going to slap Finn on the shoulder, then touches the hand without the needle in it instead, like a gentle shock. Finn doesn't know what it means, what any of this means. He wants to go back to his counting. But he also wants to know where Rey is, so he asks.

 

"I'll send the General to you," Poe says. Finn can tell his face and voice have changed, but he can't tell how, exactly. Even though he'd wanted him to go, when Poe leaves, Finn wishes he'd stayed; the room feels more like winter.

 

The General comes in the next morning and squats down by his bed. "It's good to see you awake," she says. "You wanted to see me?"

 

"Rey," he says. "Please. Where's Rey?"

 

"She went to find my brother," says the General. "I don't know how much you remember, but we finally put the map together that would show us where he is, and she took the _Falcon_ to look for him." No waver in her voice, no pause. "She's all right, Finn, I promise."

 

"How do you know? Have you heard from her?"

 

"No, but I can feel it. I can feel her ... _being_ somewhere. Even when I didn't know where Luke was, I knew he was alive."

 

"Could you always?" If they knew Rey was down in that sand pit, and they left her there for some _reason--_

 

"Oh, no. Only after I saw her, knew her, face to face. I'm not a Jedi. I trained myself a little, but I never had a teacher. But she really is okay. I'll let you know if I sense anything is wrong, I swear that. Finn--" Now she does hesitate, and seems to put on her authority again like a cape. "I was going to wait until you were up and about, but I'm going to ask you for your help. Will you tell us anything you know about the First Order--anything you think we can use?"

 

"Sure," he says. For all the good it will do.

 

"And if we manage to capture stormtroopers, will you--talk to them for us? Or at least tell us what they might respond to, what they won't respond to, things like that? It could make a big difference to the Resistance, knowing what they can tell us."

 

His mouth's dry. "They might not let you capture them," he says. "We--they weren't supposed to."

 

"You mean they might kill themselves. Yes, we know. We've found a lot of small ships adrift, with a dead crew, and we've dodged a lot of suicide explosions."

 

Sprawled limbs, burnt armor, dead in the cold drift of space. He says, "When you said talk to them, you meant interrogate them, right?"

 

"I meant ask them questions. Yes." She's watching his eyes. "The Resistance doesn't torture people," she says. "Is that what you want to know?"

 

It is, but he also knows that there are things you can say, and things you can do, that will make someone tell you what you want to know without you laying a hand on them. Especially you can say and do those things to stormtroopers, people conditioned from birth to react certain ways in certain situations. If you know what they are. If you're willing for them to hate themselves when they understand what's happened. He doesn't know what they are, but he knows they're there, they're in him too. He says, "I have to think about it."

 

"Right now, you have all the time you want to think about it," says the General. "We haven't captured any of them alive yet. But that could change fast."

 

 _Looking for First Order ships that escaped Starkiller Base,_ Poe had said.

 

*

 

When Poe gets back again, Finn's in the training room, stretching and slowly rebuilding muscle. He goes there every day after the debriefings. They seem pleased at how much he can confirm for them, and sometimes fill in, about SOP on transports and destroyers and outposts, about troop movements and strategy, about things he's overheard and put together. His maybes interest them almost as much as his certainties. He wonders who'll be sent to check on them, who'll have to act on what he said, and what they might do, and who might not come back.

 

He likes to exercise: it hurts, but in a way that fills his mind completely, leaving no room for guilt and grief and fear. "I'll spot those for you, if you want to add some weight," he hears behind his shoulder, and tears seep from his eyes into his hair.

 

Together, they work his chest and stomach and back, the core of him, and then sit on the floor and drink water. "How manly of us," Poe laughs. "Speaking of which, next time I go out, I'm taking a ship that needs a crew. You interested in flying together again?"

 

To be with Poe, the two of them, knowing exactly what to do, exactly what he was for. To have keeping Poe alive as his purpose, like when they flew together the first time. He's not stupid; he knows that when he cut down stormtroopers with the lightsaber or with a blaster, he was protecting himself, protecting Rey. He was so certain about what to do in that moment that he just did it. He also knows that when you kill someone, there's time after for you, but not for them. You get to feel the way you feel, even if it's horrible, but they don't get to feel anything. _Billions_ of people.

 

"I...don't know if I can," he says. "The General says she might need me here. To interrogate stormtroopers, if you bring any in."

 

"Oh." The temperature feels like it's dropped; Poe's shoulder, close to Finn's, has tensed. Something is wrong, more wrong than before. Finn makes a huge effort and heaves up, "What is it?" just as he might have before, if he'd ever had the chance, if they'd had time to be friends.

 

"I just don't really see you as an interrogator," Poe says, and his tone is distant too, like anybody else's voice. Now everything is impossible. Talking, not talking, getting up, staying there. Finn says, "Can you help me back to my room?" Poe's hand under his elbow feels steady and firm and warm but it's just a hand, and it's not till Finn is alone again, lying on his bed, that he remembers how they met. "I'm sorry," he whispers to the air, "I'm sorry," and the tears leak out again, as if they belonged to somebody else.

 

*

 

By the time another squadron brings the first stormtroopers in, Finn can make almost any motion with almost no pain and Poe is away again. Their goodbye was early-morning and quick, but at least it happened. He tries to focus on the feel of Poe's cheek against his hair and, more faintly, the firm callus-and-cloth grip of Rey's hand, to put them between him and the lightsaber swinging, the stormtrooper falling, the lightsaber swinging, the stormtrooper falling. Someone like him. Someone like the people he's going to see.

 

There's a durasteel grid between him and the first stormtrooper. TS-2284 looks to be barely regulation height, even with the uniform and helmet. The other, who Finn's been told is called XP-0193, is in another cell.

 

"The General says we want to know anything they know," one of her human aides, a gray-pale man called Argan, had told him on the way from sick bay to the stockade. He has an accent Finn remembers from one of the First Order officers, an older man, he thinks, he doesn't know what planet. That didn't matter in the First Order, and anyway most of the stormtroopers were from nowhere. "Obviously anything about plans, contingency plans for when the base was destroyed. None of us believe they made Starkiller their only shot at domination, so what else have they got up those fancy sleeves of theirs?" Finn felt like he had to point out that they probably wouldn't know those things, or anything useful about Snoke--much less where he actually was--or any of the other things that the Resistance wanted to know about, but Argan brushed it away. "Just find out whatever you can. For all we know, the color of Phasma's panties could be significant. And Finn, see if you can find out if any others have done what you did."

 

Great. Sure. He's supposed to get them to talk about _him,_ as he becomes less and less convinced that there's any such person _._ He wonders how they came to be taken alive: the protocol was death before capture, no exceptions. Looking at TS-2284, he also wishes he could see their face. The grid is there for him, Argan told him, as much as for them: this way, they know that they can't hurt each other, at least with their hands. He says, "My name's Finn. I used to be called FN-2187. I'm with the Resistance now."

 

The lie that came true. He doesn't want to know what this person knows. He wants to be with Rey, somewhere out of sight, some backwater, where no one needs to kill or die. Part of him--this shocks him--even wants to be back in that uniform, hearing the quiet voice that sounds like his own idea of what to do next, being certain, being sure. He knows that TS-2284 knows what's required of them, even in the absence of an officer to give the orders. They say nothing back. Does their posture change? He says, "I'm the defector. The traitor." Nothing. He says, "I wish you'd take your helmet off."

 

"If you were really FN-2187," they say--sounds like a woman, or a young boy--"you'd know we're supposed to keep our helmets on if we're captured."

 

"I'm not really FN-2187," Finn says. "Anymore. I'm Finn now." He tries to think about how to start asking them questions.

 

"Where's XP-0193?" says TS-2284. Finn glances down the hall to the cell where he knows the other stormtrooper's being held. TS-2284 follows his glance, then snaps their helmet back to center. Finn says, stupidly, "Just a second," and returns to the guardroom.

 

"Put them in together," he says to Argan.

 

"No. Hell no. You're nuts. That's nuts. What if they plot an escape? What if one of them kills the other one?"

 

"We're never alone like that. Never isolated. The only time you're isolated is when you're waiting for punishment or reconditioning. Otherwise you're always with people. This is horrible for them."

 

 _"Good,"_ says one of the stockade guards, a woman Finn doesn't know, with skin as brown as his. "They should suffer. Do you know how many people died on Hosnian Prime _alone?"_

 

Billions and billions. "We don't know that these two people had anything to do with that," he forces through stiff lips.

 

"Anything to _do_ with it? Look, I know you're the General's pet, but I think she's making a mistake. Why should we trust you? You were one of them. Don't think I didn't hear you say 'we' just now." Finn had figured there were probably Resistance people who felt this way, but this is the first time he's run into it. It barely touches him. "I was one of them," he agrees. "That's how I know what you're doing is a mistake. They won't tell you anything if they're apart."

 

"He helped us take down the Starkiller shields, Yajra," Argan says uneasily.

 

He feels so tired. He just wants it to stop, but he makes himself say, "Yeah, and before that, I helped maintain them. I don't know who these people are or what they know or what they've done. That's what I'm trying to find out, and it'll work better if they're in the same room." Yajra snorts audibly, but she and Argan go down the hall, unlock the cell, frog-march TS-2284 two doors down, open XP-0193's cell, and push TS-2284 in. When he hears the lock settle, Finn says, "I'll be back tomorrow," and leaves the stockade for the practice room, where he lifts and squats and stretches until his muscles are knotted and screaming and his mind is almost blank.

 

Second day. Clean shirt from the Resistance clothing depot, a dead man's shirt. He goes to the stockade. Is that the sound of sudden motion when they hear his steps? By the time he can see them, they're standing as they would in a transport ship, vertical, contained, side by side. When there's so much wrong, how do you pick a place to start? How do you decide, when you have time to decide? He'd wanted to go; Poe had wanted to take him. It was a real decision, but once it started happening, it moved fast and carried them along. Is this their rescue, as it was for him, or is rescue what they're hoping for? How deep is their conditioning? _Is_ it all conditioning? Do they want to go back?

 

He says, "Who do you follow--who are you loyal to?"

 

"Supreme Leader Snoke and the First Order," says TS-2284, by the rule book. Finn, who spent his entire life referring to most people by their serial numbers, finds himself itching to give them a name, but he doesn't have Poe's knack for it, and it wouldn't be the same. A gift from a rescuer isn't the same as an imposition from an interrogator. The other, whose voice he still hasn't heard, says nothing. He says, "Same for you, XP-0193?" Silence.

 

"He doesn't talk," says TS-2284. "What are you going to do with us?"

 

Finn doesn't know, and says so. "I'll ask," he adds. Some interrogator. Is it his imagination, or is there in the tone and timbre of their voice something he used to hear all around him, in his own voice, in his own head? He tries to match it when he says, "The Resistance doesn't torture people, and I won't let them kill you."

 

"Then what? I don't get it. You keep us forever? We're not going to be useful to you. We're not going to tell you anything."

 

Finn doesn't have an answer to this either, so he says the first thing that rises to the surface of his mind: "What do you mean he doesn't talk?"

 

"Just doesn't. He never has. He can listen and follow orders, that's enough for them."

 

For them. That's enough _for them._ Not just, "That's enough." A crack in the armor. Finn feels a thrill, and then in the wake of the thrill, horror, and in the wake of the horror, nothingness again. He says, "Were the two of you in paired units? Do you work together a lot? When you can?"

 

Although he can't see their eyes, he feels like they're probably staring at him. "How is knowing that going to help you?"

 

"I'm interested." He is, but he also senses that this is the kind of thing an interrogator would say, a real one, demonstrating ease and power. Maybe the kind of thing Han Solo would have said, if he ever captured someone. Leaning on something, probably. He pulls himself more upright and becomes aware that TS-2284 is saying something: "If you don't find anything out from us, they're going to send someone else. That's how it works. And that person might not be as nice as you." He has the strangest impression that these are his lines, that she's saying what she expects him to say. Or what someone has said to him before. _Did_ someone say this to him before? "If you're ever captured..." or maybe, "If you don't cooperate..." He's never been this dislocated, never, not when his squadmate raised a dying arm to paint his helmet with blood, not when he thought Poe was dead in the sand, not when he thought _he_ was dead in the snow. He says, fighting vertigo, fighting weightlessness, "I really wish you would take your helmets off."

 

On the fifth day, one of them does. Facing Finn, looking straight at him, XP-0193 unclips his helmet and lifts it away. Their eyes collide. The stormtrooper's are deep-brown and deep-set, like the patinaed metal of a very old ship. "Thanks," Finn says. XP-0193 looks at him with an unreadable expression on the bleak planes of his face, turns to TS-2284 and touches them at the joint of their wrist and hand armor. Finn remembers touching people like that, in the transport, in the bunks, on the parade ground even. A signal. A comfort.

 

"He wants me to talk to you," says TS-2284, who sounds tired. "But I can't figure out what he wants me to say. When I ask is it this or that, he shakes his head. And _I_ don't want to talk to you."

 

Finn says, "Do you remember reconditioning?" It isn't what he meant to ask, but of all the things that people have told him to ask, and all the things he thought of that he could ask, it's the only one he actually wants the answer to. And he thinks maybe they won't say, or can't. He's never tried to talk about it, so he's not sure. But after a long pause TS-2284 says, "I remember... feeling better. Not better, though. More solid, like I wasn't sure, and then I was sure."

 

"That's what I remember too," Finn says, and now he's talking, too much, this isn't what he's here for. "But it starts to go away. Maybe if you do something that's a lot against it, like I did, it goes away faster, I don't know, but I don't think it's just that. But now I'm not sure. About anything. That's why I'm so bad at this."

 

"But you're still out there," TS-2284 points out, "and we're still in here."

 

This is so true that he has to leave.

 

*

 

"No," says the General. "Absolutely not. Finn, has it occurred to you that these two may be manipulating you? If you were in prison--if you were imprisoned by people you'd been led to believe were your bitterest enemies--wouldn't you say whatever you thought would get you out? Wouldn't you look for any weakness, any vulnerability, that your captors had, and use that?"

 

He thinks about pointing out that one of them's barely said anything and the other one _can't_ say anything, as far as he knows, because he knows that's not the point and that her patience has been thinning since the moment she assured him, once again, that Rey is fine, that she would know if anything was badly wrong. He says instead, "I wasn't the right person. If you wanted someone who would get things out of them, all that happened was they got things out of me. All I _have_ are vulnerabilities, except apparently I'm not too bad at killing people. Maybe you should just let me do that."

 

General Organa's eyes are flint, are winter. "We're not in a position where anyone can afford to act like a child," she says. "We don't have enough people, enough knowledge, enough equipment or enough time. If you don't think you can get them to tell you anything we might want to know, then you're right, we should take you off the job, and we will find another place where you can be useful. But leave the drama out of it."

 

"Conditioning," he says.

 

"What about it?"

 

"Would knowing more about it help? I think I can get them--well, TS-2284--to talk about that. They _did_ talk about it, at one point. And--" he swallows--"it helps that I want to talk about it. I want to know more. About what happened to me and--why it stopped." Her face hasn't exactly thawed, but she's listening. "If we could figure out how to undo First Order conditioning, would that be good for the Resistance?" He can feel the momentum of decision pulling him along, dragging the words out.

 

"Possibly," she concedes after a long pause. "If we could capture more stormtroopers, which may I remind you is not exactly a stroll in the garden. Or--if we could infiltrate a transport, or even a destroyer. Yes, that could work." And, incredibly, a tiny smile tugs at the corners of her mouth and eyes. "We did it once before."

 

*

 

On the 11th day of the interrogation, Poe comes home. Finn's back in his quarters now, has been for a week or so. He's sitting on the bed between one boot and the other when he hears the knock, calls out, "Come in," and feels the room fill with life almost before he sees who it is.

 

"You look tired," Poe says, sitting on the bed beside him. "The General told me a little bit about it." Finn still gets a kick out of how Poe looks and sounds when he says, "The General," like he can't really believe she condescended to talk to him. He takes these reactions to Poe as good signs, signs that maybe he's in there somewhere, that he can be found. "Are you making progress?" Poe's asking. "One thing I will say, I'm impressed that you've kept them alive. That's more than we can say for any other stormtroopers we've ever brought in."

 

"I didn't know," is all Finn can manage to say to that.

 

"It's true. We still don't know how the others did it. We took away anything you could even imagine using as a weapon--well, obviously--and the medics couldn't figure it out either, when they looked at the bodies. It's like they just refused to live anymore. I didn't know that was--Finn, I'm sorry. Finn! Hey!"

 

Who's that, whose name is that, barely a shape in the void. And then he has a shape, in the places where Poe's arms are around his arms, and Poe's chest is pressed against his back, and Poe's cheek is defining one side of his skull. "I'm here," a voice is saying, "you're here, you didn't die. Is that what this is about? You saved me, even. You saved us both. That's like the opposite of dying. You're right here, I'm right here, we made it. Are you crying? Good, that's good, dead people don't cry, that's great, just keep it up, that's terrific."

 

Is it a decision to take the hand gripping his shoulder and bring it to his lips, where he kisses from knuckle to nail and back, while he feels rather than hears Poe's indrawn breath and tastes his own tears caught in the hairs on the backs of Poe's fingers? It is a decision, when Poe says, "I won't lie, Finn, I want this, but are you sure you do? I mean are you sure this is the time?" to say, "Yes."

 

"Okay," Poe says, moving around to look into his face, "but I'm gonna keep checking, because, I don't know, that just seems like a good idea right now." And then he kisses Finn on the neck, on the collarbone, on the mouth.

 

Poe is graceful; he makes a teasing game of it, the _Do you like that_ and _I'm gonna do this to you._ Finn says yes to everything. Every touch, yes, every bite, yes, every moment of friction gathers him, and summons him, and makes him someone. In the middle of the night, he wakes in sweat and fear, feels Poe's warmth and weight next to him, returns to sleep. Wakes again to the smell of morning breath. "Your lips," Poe says between kisses when he sees Finn's eyes are open. "I've been dreaming about these lips."

 

Finn's been dreaming about planets guttering out of the sky, about strangers' chests turning to ash, but he doesn't say so. This morning he feels a little more equal to giving pleasure as well as receiving it, and when he feels fingertips dig into his hair and Poe whisper-hisses his name like it's a curse, he feels almost triumphant.      

 

"I have to go back to the stockade," he says eventually. The light has moved from their chests to their shins to the corner by the door.

 

"Mmm. I'm sorry I went off on you about that. In the training room, remember? We all have to do stuff we don't want to do." His voice is light and warm, unstressed. It makes Finn wonder: has he really let it go like that? Not just the anger, but the past that prompted it, and more. He thinks about the lasers Poe fires, the explosives he drops. If we do it, don't we _want_ to do it, whatever it is? Do I mind? Does he? He kisses Poe on the forehead, ducks down the hall to the fresher, puts on clean underthings and another dead man's shirt and the rest of his clothes. He says, "Stay as long as you want," like someone who does this all the time, and heads over to the stockade, holding his head carefully like it might spill.

 

 _Why didn't you die?_ doesn't seem like the best question, and _Why didn't I_ seems worse, so he starts where he left off the last time. TS-2284 will talk about conditioning but not about anything else, and XP-0193, of course, doesn't talk, or even really interact with Finn at all. But sometimes he'll do what Finn saw him do before, the touch at the wrist joint, or a tap on another part of his companion's armor, and TS-2284 will add something to what they're saying, or turn the conversation. A warning? Encouragement? In some ways, the bigger stormtrooper seems to be the one with the most stake in what's happening, and the least ability to get it to happen.

 

There's no one else in the stockade right now. He wonders why they built it so big, or if it's left over from something else. Their cell has a ship-size fresher adjoining it, they can walk around the stockade courtyard--under the eyes of Yajra, her counterpart Dori, and their team of droids--and they get the same rations as any member of the Resistance. He prefers to talk in the courtyard, a droid with a stun gun keeping pace with them in case one of them decides to try to rip his head off, or something.

 

The sky is gray; they're walking by the south wall. "The times when it felt the weakest?" TS-2284 repeats. "It's hard to say, because like we were saying, you would only notice when it got strong again. So I'm trying to remember it by that."

 

"What happened right before they reconditioned you," he prompts.

 

"Right." They're moving their head restlessly. He says, "Want to take off your helmet?" which would almost be a running joke if, as TS-2284 keeps pointing out, one of them weren't the prisoner and the other a party to their imprisonment.

 

"No," they say. "I think one time--

 

"Is something bothering your head? You keep moving it around."

 

They stop, kicking up a spurt of dust. Finn and XP-0193 and the droid all stop too, and maybe all of them are wondering if this is the moment that Finn turns out to have been terribly wrong. But they say, "I can't explain it," and there's tension, struggle, and before Finn can say anything else they say, "No, you don't understand, I _can't_ explain it," and he hears the note in their voice that he's heard a couple of times before and he says, "You're allowed to do it now." His words vague, his tone precise. Targeted. Just like pointing a finger. TS-2284 stops again, and fumbles at their neck, and then for the first time they and Finn can see each other's eyes. Theirs are wet and red-rimmed in a long medium-brown face, above which once-tight braids are coming loose and frizzing out. "She's dead," they say. "She used to fix my hair, and then they tried to make me forget her." XP-0193 nods, a sharp decisive nod, as if to say, _That's_ what I wanted you to tell him.

 

*

 

The General and her next-in-commands are very grateful, but it seems to Finn that they would rather the answer was anything else. "So far," Statura is saying, "we have a sample size of two, in which both cases of broken conditioning had the same cause, which is something we can't predict or replicate."

 

"We could by shooting one of a pair each time," a human whose name Finn doesn't know offers. The General cuts her eyes at him. "Just trying to lighten the mood."

 

He's tried to convey what they told him, intercut with what he's starting to remember himself: quiet friendships between stormtroopers, carried on under the sensors, but instant cause for reconditioning if you were caught. Probably the two friends had been separated and reconditioned multiple times; the First Order didn't want any divided loyalties. But they'd been drawn back together every time. It wasn't clear whether they'd killed TS-1306 _because_ of the friendship or for some other reason, but her death had clearly set up a scar in her friend's mind, and that scar, for Finn, turned into a door.

 

But the question now is whether there's anything behind the door besides the story of what happened. Tiesse's telling of it might reveal more to a more experienced listener, but so far they won't talk to anyone but Finn and the senior weapons maintenance officer who, when he saw them, clucked his tongue and sat them down between his knees and began to restore order, talking about his daughters and their hair, and his nephews and _their_ hair, and asking if he was pulling too much, and humming in between talking. Yajra's reaction when he'd asked if anyone on the base could do it was profane and lengthy, and it took nearly an hour of false starts and odd looks before he landed on Hadrian Serrit, who brought the same precision to Tiesse's scalp that he presumably brings to triggers and fuses and relays. Finn found them a tunic and pants to wear if they felt like changing out of the rest of their uniform, and a similar batch for XP-0193, who lifted the clothes gently and put them down on the cell bench beside him.

 

The officer's joke wasn't a joke. Finn understands that. He wonders if seeing Tiesse get their hair fixed would change it, or if he wouldn't be able to see a stormtrooper and a person at the same time, taking up the same space. He thinks of Yajra's words, aimed at him. What does that officer see when he looks at Finn? What does Poe--

 

No. Poe saw him as a person almost before he took his helmet off. Almost before he saw himself that way. He tries to put this into words that night as they lie next to each other, sweaty and spent and a little sore. "You make me feel like I exist," he says, and then thinks maybe that's not something you say.

 

"Of course you exist," Poe says in a sleepy voice. "And a good thing too."

 

"I'm not sure." Maybe _that's_ not something you say, because Poe's up on an elbow now, looking at him hard. "You're not sure it's a good thing, or you're not sure you exist?"

 

"Both."

 

"Shit," Poe says, falling onto his back and staring at the ceiling. "Do you want to talk about it?"

 

"I don't know how to talk about it." But he tries. Being a stormtrooper, then killing stormtroopers, then trying to get stormtroopers to talk. The power he had over the two prisoners, even when he tried not to use it, just because they were prisoners and he wasn't. And then using it, on purpose and yet almost without thinking, to get through TS-2284's--Tiesse's--defenses. "I helped them remember something the First Order tried to make them forget," he says. "That should be a good thing, but the way I did it seems wrong. And now the Resistance wants to use that, somehow, to help more stormtroopers break their conditioning. If it works, that means more people get to be like me. Except I don't think the Resistance thinks they're people. And the First Order didn't want us to think we were people either. And sometimes I, I, I feel like I'm not."

 

"You are. Of course you are. But you don't need me for that." Poe still sounds bewildered and Finn remembers once again that Poe has _always_ looked at him and seen a person, a man, that maybe he's confused because this really is news to him. "Even if I wasn't around, you'd still be you. And about the other stuff, like I said before, you're doing what you have to do. What we have to do. Which is all anybody can do, in the middle of a war, which we are."

 

"I hate it," Finn says, knowing he sounds childish, not stopping himself. "I hate everything about it. I hate that people died because of me. I didn't want that."

 

"Maybe it's just that these are your first decisions," Poe suggests. "Everyone in the Resistance has had to make hard decisions ever since they signed on--hell, before that. And they've had to live with the consequences, and keep living, and keep making decisions. But it's your first time."

 

"Maybe. I guess. I wish I could be certain. Of what to do. But I don't _want_ to want to be certain, because, because--"

 

"Because of conditioning? Is that what conditioning feels like? I thought it felt like--" Now it's Poe's turn to stutter, to stop, and Finn's to look at him with concern, and then to put one arm across him and use the other hand to stroke his hair, because Finn is pretty sure he knows what Poe's going to say, this time. "When Ren was inside my head," he says finally. "I thought it was like someone turning _over_ your thoughts, and they _like_ it, and you're, you know, helpless. I was helpless. I did _not_ like that," trying, clearly, for a return of his old jokey voice. Finn holds him and breathes into his neck. It doesn't seem like the time to talk about what conditioning's like. It seems like the time to hold Poe and keep him here, in the present, the smells of sweat and jizz and skin, the wrinkles in standard-issue sheets, the serene and human dark.

 

*

 

They seem to think it's worth the risk. Tiesse has revealed a few more things, and the most important is where their ship, with two officers and its crew of 16--all the others dead now--was going. A rendezvous with a battle cruiser carrying a complement of nearly 200. And from there to a space station whose coordinates XP-0193 taps out on Tiesse's arm, that could be a prime spot for infiltration, for spreading misinformation over First Order channels, for seeing if deconditioning can work. If nothing else, they can probably create a few rounds of confusion and maybe even set a few traps before Snoke catches on--if they make it that far. The mood in the staff room is not exactly jubilant, but there's a wary pleasure, an itch to action.

 

Finn doesn't know how to correlate everything he's learning: the controls on the old Rebel ship they're supposed to have commandeered or hotwired or scavenged, they're still working on the story; that Poe likes his hair pulled when he comes (easy) and dirty talk when they're working up to it (more complicated, especially since their slang doesn't always overlap); the names and peculiarities of Tiesse's and XP-0193's commanding officers, in case they're still alive. "They'll know I'm not you," he says to them during one of the briefings.

 

"I don't think so," they say. They're looking well. Their skin has light behind it and their braids are tight, and they agree with him that the training room helps. "I don't think they look for the difference between us."

 

"But I remember officers saying things..."

 

"Like that you were officer material?" Tiesse gives him the sideways look he's come to expect from them, like he's a baby, even though they could be from the same creche ship. "They don't need to know who you are to say that. They just need you to feel a certain way, so you'll act a certain way. The only reason they never said it to XP-0193 is because they knew he wouldn't believe it." XP-0193 makes the sideways grimace that indicates he's in on the joke, if it is a joke. "We had to know them, but they didn't have to know us. So with Captain Barca, what you want to know is he's a real rules guy, very rigid, takes everything kind of personally..."

 

At first he had to use the conditioning voice more in order for them to talk at all. Now he tries to use it less, but sometimes they need it--that's what they say when they come to something they can't say without it, "I need," and then a noise in their throat, and he'll ask the question again. They also say that anyone who wants them back in that armor will have to bury them in it, but XP-0193 has indicated that he's willing to go back and help keep up the deception.

 

And it's XP-0193 who shows him, with touches and gestures, that he needs to relearn how to stand and move: his posture is that of a free man. One of Hadrian's droid assistants is adjusting Tiesse's old armor for Finn, and he practices in it, practices answering to their serial number, practices acting emptiness while keeping his mind full. Each moment of his day is bursting with information, with meetings, with voices, and each moment of his evening is flooded with pleasure and just enough pain, and his sleep is dreamless with exhaustion and the feel of Poe's chest against his back. He tells himself that if he just does enough he can crowd out the counting, the bodies falling through emptiness. That all the things he does are who he is.

 

And Rey is coming home.

 

The General tells him privately, at the end of yet another strategy meeting, and asks him not to tell anyone else yet. Finn's heart feels like it's blooming. He almost imagines that he can feel her coming closer, but he knows he's making it up.

 

It's only later that the doubts and fears come creeping. Who will she be? He doesn't know much about Jedi training, but he's heard about their principles of non-attachment. Does that include your friends? Will she still need him? Did she ever?

 

And what will she think of him? When she asks him what he did while she was gone (of course she'll ask, she'll want to know, she's kind) will he tell her he took advantage of stormtrooper conditioning to turn other people into traitors? Sat and stared at the wall while planets blew up in his mind? Will he tell her how last night Poe knelt over him and fucked his mouth, while he touched himself and came like a streak of lightning? Everything he's been doing to make himself a self all of a sudden doesn't seem like enough.

 

What actually happens is that the Falcon lands and the port opens and she walks down, moving calmly with her head erect and her trousers billowing a little in the escape of air, and takes a deep breath, and sees him, and rockets toward him and throws her arms around him and presses him close, and he's crying again, and so is she. He breathes in the smell of her hair and neck and almost misses the stocky, graying man who's followed her out, flanked by Chewbacca, whose posture suggests the anxious parent of a toddler learning to walk; he doesn't hear or see the General leave the low building where her staff room is and cross the landing site, but she must have, because when the mist in his eyes clears, she and the stranger are locked in each other's arms, standing like a column that cannot be shaken.

 

*

 

           

It turns out he didn't have to worry about what to say, at least at first. She's got plenty for both of them, the delight and hunger he remembers breaking now and then through the calm of her training. How hard it is to learn, and how exciting. How it felt to begin to sense the Force, first in Luke, then in Chewie, and then in everything, even the plants and rocks around them, even the ocean that washed at the foot of the island.

 

"I can feel it in you," she says, placing both her hands in both of his, which he can barely believe, and closing her eyes, so he can stare at her face. "It's beautiful--it's like the surface of a planet at night, or like the sky. A beautiful web of light and dark."

 

"And _dark?"_ He realizes he's trying to pull his hands away.

 

"Don't be afraid of it. Everyone has both, and everything--every plant, every planet, every star." She stills sounds rapt and hushed. "Luke was really careful to teach me that, and to show me how to feel for both. His masters told him the dark side was always evil, always wrong, that he had to turn away from it and never even look at it, but you can't do that--if you try to drive it out, that's when it turns on you. It hurt him, and he thinks it hurt his father, and made him into what he became. And it hurt--" She stops. "He thinks if he had been a different kind of teacher, Ben--"

 

He wonders if, like him, she's feeling the snow and wind again, the white flakes and the dark trees like swirling enemies, or if it's something else. She seems far from him, but he doesn't reach for her.

 

The whole base is in a strange state since she came back: it's changed from the grim, practical cheer of the previous days to a kind of bemused, bittersweet fog. People who've resented each other for years over something they barely remember have reconciled, Poe tells him, and people who've been pining in secret have made their declarations of love. "Not that it always worked," he adds. "But they got it out to the last person in the galaxy who didn't know about it, so I guess that's good." He makes languishing eyes at Finn, who can't manage a laugh, but kisses him instead.

 

"It's Luke and Leia," Rey explains later, when all three of them are eating together in the mess--or rather, after she's finished eating, since Rey doesn't talk when she eats, and while the other two are using their food as an excuse to not look at each other. "They're glad and sad to be back together, and they're not shielding it, I don't know why. But I think they're amplifying each other, and anyone else on the base with any Force sensitivity. It's like the whole planet is glowing. Do you guys feel it?"

 

They look up at the same time, they all look at each other. "Yeah," Poe says in a tone that's not like anything Finn's ever heard from him, addressing the squadron or at the mess table or in the training room or in bed or even on the deck of the Finalizer, that first time. "It feels like, 'While we still can.'"

           

 

*

 

"Absolutely not," the General says. Her face softens a little, as it does whenever she speaks to Rey, but her voice remains firm. "The Falcon doesn't look like anything else in space--"

 

"Which is a good thing," Poe says to Finn under his breath. Chewie gargles an anatomically unlikely suggestion, Poe says, "Anytime," and the rest of the General's staff look impatient. " _And,"_ she continues, "the last thing we want is anyone questioning that Finn and XP-0193 are genuine castaways. A known Resistance ship in First Order space would raise those questions instantly, which is why our covering team will be waiting in salvaged TIE fighters."

 

"Then let me go in with Finn. I can Force cloak us, I can keep people from questioning us--"

 

" _No."_ The room startles and quiets. Evenly, and painfully, the General says, "Rey, forgive me for saying this, but Kylo Ren has fought you face to face, and mind to mind. I know you've been working hard and have come a long way, but if he's anywhere near this space station he would know your presence instantly. We can't risk it."

 

She visibly seizes control of herself, where the Rey he first met would have shouted. "I don't want to send Finn in there alone."

 

Too many people in the room not saying things that can't be said; too many eyes on him, too many hopes. He's adrift again, limbless, the void in his eyes as the argument goes on around him. Eventually he becomes aware that people are rising, that Rey is casting a glance back at him as she walks off with Luke Skywalker and that Poe is leaving with the handpicked group of pilots who'll be within call. To help them get back, if all goes well, and to rip the station to shreds, with them and everyone else on it, if it doesn't.

 

It's Tiesse and XP-0193 who stop, stand one on each side of him, and help him to his feet. They walk him across the compound and over to the edge of the trees, where the three of them sometimes hold their briefings and do their practicing now that they're no longer confined to the stockade. It seems to work better. They walk for a while, till Finn starts to be able to notice the deepening shadows and the cool exhalations from the trees, and to say, "What's the point of being able to make choices if the only thing you can choose is which people to kill?"

 

Their stride doesn't break. They all walk evenly together, though their legs are different lengths; it's those years of parade discipline. Tiesse says, "You also get to choose who to protect," and swallows hard a couple of times and then goes on: "I would have protected her if I could," and he knows they mean TS-1306, who used to braid their hair. "But they wouldn't let me. And who I _was_ protecting was Captain Barca, and General Hux, and Kylo _Ren,_ and the Supreme Leader. I didn't have any reason to protect them. I would rather have protected her. I tuh-tried to. I wanted to. Maybe it's just a way of cuh-cuh-cuh-cuh--" They stop; Finn waits; they start over. "Maybe it's just a way of conditioning yourself, to think like that. Maybe it's not really different. I don't know."

 

They walk a little longer. XP-0193 touches his arm in the way that means, _Are you ready?_ and he says, "I think so. Yeah, let's go back."

 

Rey is waiting for him by the door of his quarters, sitting in meditation pose in the almost-gone light. When he reaches her, she stands fluidly and says, "Can I come in with you?"

           

They go in together, past the neatly folded change of clothes, the pile of flimsies with diagrams of the Rebel ship's controls, and lie down on the bed that smells like him and Poe, her chest to his back, as easily as if they'd done this every night she was away. "You can tell me if you want," she says, "but you don't need to tell me."

 

"Can we just lie like this?"

 

"Sure." They do, for a long time. He says, "I don't want you to come on the mission."

 

"Poe Dameron asked if I'd be his gunner and mechanic. He says I have a better chance than anyone else he knows of keeping those hunks of bantha manure running." Although their accents in Basic are different, she's caught Poe's delivery perfectly, and Finn feels a smile rising in spite of himself. She says, "Finn, I wouldn't be safe here either. I want us to do what we have to do together, if we can."

 

What we _have_ to do. He says, "I want to go someplace where there is no war. With you. But there's no such place."

 

"Maybe we can make it," she says. He can't answer that, so there's more quiet, full of her presence. After a while she adds, "He loves you. He wants to protect you."

 

"Poe does? Wait, did he tell you that, or did you--" It hasn't occurred to him till now that she might be able to sense what other people are thinking, or even go looking for it. How Poe would hate that, and fear it.

 

"What he actually said was, 'I want you to help me cover Finn.' The love was a guess. Finn, I know about Ren. I know he used the Force to torture Poe, and search his mind. He did that to me, too. I know he likes people to be afraid. I won't ever do that to Poe or to you. Anything you give me will have to be freely given."

 

*

 

The plan solidifies; the day of their departure looms. Poe and Rey are together most days now, doing flight simulations and working on some augmentations to the TIE fighters that she thinks will give them an edge. Finn spends his days trying to gather every last detail that XP-0193 and Tiesse have to give--another round of interrogation helps them think of the serial numbers of people to try deconditioning first, if they're still alive, and some questions to ask. At the end of a long session, Tiesse asks, "If you don't come back, will they kill me?"

 

"What? No!" But he's stricken with doubt. Are they, in fact, a hostage without knowing it? The General can't be found, so he asks Argan, who looks at him coldly. "You have a pretty low opinion of us, it seems like," he says, but he doesn't answer the question.

 

Finn needs to be sure. He needs to know he did this one thing right. The General would be the one person in the Resistance whose word would be unlikely to be overturned, though theoretically it could happen. He can't get to her, but maybe he can do the next best thing. He heads for the training room.

 

"Come in, Finn," says Luke Skywalker, Rey's teacher, the stranger. "Are you looking for Rey? She just took a break to eat something--or more likely everything."

 

"No, sir." He's surprised at the word; it slips out. "I'm looking for you. I need your help with something." He explains.

 

Skywalker looks grave and scratches in his beard. "I don't think my sister would ever order that," he says. "But you're worried that other people might see it differently."

 

"That Tiesse had betrayed us, or given us the wrong information, or that if we fail, it's because of them somehow. Or just because--because they're a stormtrooper. They might not see it like killing a person."

 

"And you think they'll listen to me?" Skywalker's smile is part grimace. "You might be right, but then again, I abandoned them. Some still see it as a betrayal. All right, Finn, I'll do what I can."

 

That's not enough. "Please say you'll protect them. Sir."

 

A long moment. It gives Finn time to look into Skywalker's face, the sadness and more than sadness there, the lines around his eyes, the years of decisions and living with decisions, the story of his hesitation now. "I'll protect Tiesse, Finn," Luke Skywalker says. "As long as you understand that there are limits to what I can do."

 

Rey knocks on the door of his quarters later that night, smears of engine grease on her knees. "Luke told me what you said to him," she says the minute she's inside. "You do understand what you're asking?" Clearly she feels it's too much, that she has to defend her teacher, and he sees how complicated and at odds they are, these urges and promises, the work that follows on loving someone, and the risk. In a way, there's nothing he can ask, that anyone can ask, that wouldn't be too much. And he knows too that he can't be sure that Skywalker will keep his promise, or want to, or be able to; he knows that if the First Order hits D'Qar everyone he's come to love or hate or just be aware of here will die together. That he might die a stormtrooper again, despite everything he did to avoid it, and everywhere he went, and everyone he met.

 

_It feels like, "While we still can."_

 

He says, "Please come here to me," and she does.

 

It's different, of course it is, the wire of her arms around him, the silk of the hair on her legs when he kneels for her, her smells, her taste, her voice. Different than what he's known, but also different than what he imagined. Real, herself, utterly irreplaceable, and incredibly, in the face of everything they know, she seems happy. She straddles him and rides him and _laughs,_ and his vision explodes into soft dark stars.

 

*

 

Their last day on D'Qar: a long goodbye, and a council of war.

 

The optimal time for takeoff, according to the navigational computers, will be an hour or so before dawn, so they have the day to sleep if they can, or to do and say what they have to do and say. Rey's with Skywalker; Poe's wherever he went when he crawled out of Finn's bed that morning. Finn and Tiesse and XP-0193 walk together. They go over everything he's supposed to know and everything about who he's supposed to be and who he should try to talk to first. He makes one last effort at imitating Tiesse's voice, the upper edge of his range with a little strain in it, and then dropping into his normal voice, he tells them about Luke's promise. "That's the old one?" Tiesse says doubtfully.

 

"He's stronger than he looks. Go to him if someone's threatening you, or call for him if someone's hurting you. You can even call for him in your mind. He should be able to hear you." Their eyes widen with naked alarm. "No no no no no," he says hastily. "He won't enter your mind. He won't take your thoughts. It's safe to call him." Like every promise, so fragile that it's borderline insane to make it.

 

XP-0193 takes their arm. "Can you leave us for a little bit?" Tiesse asks. "He says he'll see you at the launch."

 

Finn walks over to the launch site and goes over the ship for the hundredth time. The technicians and maintenance droids step aside for him. He sits at the controls, alone, and tries to breathe the way Rey does when she drops into Force meditation. It doesn't seem to do much, but he stays there a while, trying to teach himself to be in the pilot's chair, trying not to think about putting on Tiesse's old armor, and the anger he might feel in it, the hatred. About dying in it, maybe--probably. About the damage he might do, the lives that might be in his hands. About the possibility of setting someone else as free as he is, even if that isn't much.

 

The little ship trembles, because Rey and Poe are clambering into it. Rey's in her practice gear, Poe's in civvies. The cockpit isn't built for three; they're jammed together, muscle and bone. They give him shape and substance, weight and matter--freely, as a gift. He offers it, freely, back to them.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to gabby_silang, who asked why Finn wasn't more thrown by killing stormtroopers, and for the AU story "The Stars I Abdicated." 
> 
> Thanks to nevanna, lynx-eyed beta reader, who's writing mini heartbreakers in Dollhouse and Agent Carter right now.
> 
> This was intended to be a one-off, and I guess you could still read it as that. But if you want to find out what happened when they went on the mission, you'll be able to in a week or so.


End file.
